Open Letter to Amazon

Dear Amazon,

Here are some serious issues needing your attention:

1) ePub support: This is the mp3 of the book industry. It’s pure corporate selfishness not to allow me to read this format on my device. Don’t be Apple and tell me how, and under what conditions, I can use your hardware. How about building a machine that unabashedly “just works”?

2) Better PDF support:

• I want to be able to read most PDFs in portrait mode without needing a magnifying glass
• To do this, you need better zoom tools. 120% would work nice.
• Being able to highlight text while zoomed in would be nice.
• Actually zooming in on the area I selected would be very helpful. Why provide me the option then not perform the function?
• Even better, build a script that zooms in to the text margins automatically.
• And why, exactly, do PDF’s I email my Kindle never arrive?

3) Decripple the browser: Why, exactly, won’t you let me open PDFs from Dropbox or anywhere else on the web? This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

4) Decripple WiFi: I know you want to sell more 3G units, but it’s unbelievable that I can neither connect to my work WiFi network nor ad-hoc WiFi from my phone or computer. This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling.

5) I know this one is crazy – but how about controls for the music player? Like choosing an album. Or going back. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

6) Open your code and let people fix these mistakes in a timely manner or let them build a better OS than what you have now. There’s nothing innovative in this code worth protecting. Learn from Nokia – open weak code to save the platform.

Regards,
– Trey

The Confucian Blind Spot

Huang Hung, writing for the Daily Beast, wrote a fairly powerful essay “Has China Gone Mad?”

….are we monsters who pay people to throw away dead babies, give children poisonous vaccines, eat food cooked with gutter grease, and kill people out of revenge, however justified? As we are becoming more powerful in the world, we must ask ourselves: what are our values?

I want to jump off a cliff and straight into something out of my league and try to explain what I feel, sometimes, is a a lack of morality in China. Now, this is a difficult thing to say. The Chinese are often some of the most moral and honest people you could ever hope to find. To parents, for instance, the Chinese I know would stop at nothing to ensure their happiness. What those parents expect from their children, however, might be a different issue. There’s something deeper and fundamentally flawed about Chinese society today and I think it’s been around for a long time. That something, I think, is a call to a conform to a Greater Good.

Fei Xiaotong once described the structure of Chinese society as being like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a lake. Each ring is a different layer of guanxi (relationships) with the closest being the strongest. For those in the innermost ring you stop at nothing to help them and they for you. My Chinese friends are the most loyal I could ever hope to find. They (seriously) offered to have someone beat up my wife’s boss when I first met her years ago. Today a student showed me an Armani watch a friend gave him upon returning from America. Likewise, children in Shenzhen often give almost all their earnings to their parents back home after deducting for basic living expenses.

But then there’s the darker side. A friend of a friend – an American – went to an ATM in Luohu late at night and was approached by a gang of robbers. He took his card and fled. He ran into a parked taxi and screamed “go go go!”. The taxi driver turned off the car, took the keys, and walked away. The gang beat and stabbed the man who continued to resist. I had another friend attacked outside the gates of his college while the guards who knew him stood by and watched. He had stepped in to help a woman being attacked by a drunk boyfriend. My Chinese friends told him he should had never have gotten involved. There are also multiple stories of bus robberies where the robbers wait till the next stop to get off. Even though everyone knows what just happened, they let them off. To stretch the issue, it’s not to difficult to imagine the Japanese taking the country so easily – nobody stood up to them. It was someone elses problem, no theirs, ad infinitum. Chiang Kai-shek/蒋介石 couldn’t even be bothered to fight them.

The issue, then, is that outside those rings – those relationships – there’s nothing. Meiguanxi, as the Chinese would say. It’s not unimportant that the first time the Chinese ever donated money on a massive and collective scale was in 2008 after the Wenchuan Earthquake. My research on civil society/NGOs in China has led me down a similar path – that there is almost no civil society here. The core institutions of China are those guanxi circles – business, relatives, and friends – and the Party.

Instead of complaining about, I want to attempt to answer the question of why it’s like this. Here’s my stab. Confucianism is fatally flawed by a gigantic blind-side that has forever plagued the Middle Kingdom. Confucianism preaches responsibility to another, but not the Other. The Greater Good, for Confucius, was byproduct of everyone was doing what they were supposed to do. When kings acted like proper kings and sons acted like proper sons everything would flow along harmoniously. Bear in mind that Confucianism isn’t just some patriarchal moral philosophy it’s sometimes made out to be. Husbands and kings had a great deal of responsibility to the people under them. These were not the Lord-Serf relationships of Europe. So with the king/father paying tribute to his people/wife and the people/wife paying tribute to him what could go wrong?

The Blind Side. Outside of those relationships there are no other responsibilities to other people. How are other kings supposed to act towards other kings? Other fathers to other men?

Where Jesus, Buddha, et all summed it up with “treat others as you’d like to be treated”, Confucius took a different road, “treat others the way they’re supposed to be treated” but with a fairly limited definition of “other.”

This is not to say that all “Westerners” follow this path, only that this is a bedrock philosophy of Western Civilization. Some of the greatest progressive social changes of our time have come from simply confronting the issue, are we treating the Other right? The long battle for civil rights in America came by identifying the descendants of slaves as an equal other. From there, the rest of the equation was simple.

She ends her essay with,

I sincerely doubt that the all Chinese hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think my answer, likewise, is no.

An Anti-Torture Defense of Yoo

My position against torture is a little more nuanced than what you’d see over at the Daily Dish. I agree with Sullivan that the war on terror isn’t so fundamentally different that we have to break with the tradition of respecting human rights while fighting that crushed the Nazis in the Second World War. I think it’s immoral and abhorrent in all it’s forms – from the stress positions, waterboarding, to sleep and sensory deprivation. I think the Geneva Conventions should and does apply to this war like every other

Even with that, I offer a limited support to John Yoo and Bush’s Office of Legal Council’s (OLC) infamous “torture memos.” This is because almost every rule has to be broken or stretched at some point or another. I think this is the heart of what I hoe those memos are is that there might be a time when the Geneva Conventions would cause more harm than good.

A Broken Culture? The Government (Part 1)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about James Fallows‘ twenty-three year old description of the Philippines today, “A Broken Culture.” It’s important because there’s another election around the corner, a new round a people promising an end to poverty, but the outlook is the same. Fallows argued, and was right, that the end martial law under Marcos and return to democratic rule under (recently deceased) Aquino wasn’t going to fix the underlying problems of the Philippines despite the optimism at the time.

All in all, I think I agree with Fallows. But it isn’t just a broken culture. It’s a broken economy, a broken polity, and a fractured state. I unfortunately agree that these problems seem as intractable today as they did then. I want to take a different approach than Fallows and instead of looking at what’s wrong with the Philippines, I want to look at what’s right and ask why it’s not working. The most frustrating thing about the Philippines is that it seems like it has all the right pieces when each part is viewed in isolation, but the whole of society and the polity just isn’t moving like it should.

First, let’s look at the government.

Teaching in China: Pt 2, Jobs and Pay

It is not impossible to make more than I made as an American high school teacher in China while enjoying the lifestyle that comes from living a developing countries cost of living. It’s the land of $5 massages, $2 meals, and easy-to-find $20/hr part-time work. It usually takes time though. For comparison, Saudi Arabia is usually hailed as having the best salaries for TEFL teachers in the world. An older friend looking to buy a house and retire with his wife in Thailand did the calculations of what it would take to get that house factoring in salary and cost of living expenses. Two years, he said, in Saudi Arabia but just three in China. The bottom line is that you won’t be poor teaching in China, and in fact can have a higher quality of life than teaching in America.

Teaching in China: Pt 1, The Visa

I’ve worked in Mainland China for almost four years now. The first year and a half was as a recruiter for what turned out to be a fairly awful company. I want to share here my experiences working in this field and watching trends since I’ve been here. I really like what EmptyBottle.org did for TEFL in Korea and want to make the same thing for China

Visas are the most common headache for foreign teachers in China. My own wife was “deported” once because of a visa crackdown. Start processing the kind of visa before coming over – it’s much more difficult trying to get things worked out inside of China

Standard Operating Procedures

Hera’s father works for the local government and was telling us yesterday about “SOP” – Standard Operating Procedure. It’s the term for executive-level corruption in the Philippines. SOP is the jacking up of the price of government projects by contractors who then pass the extra cash on to government officials. I was told last night by the Mayor’s speech writer that any project more than 20 million pesos (about $500,000) gets 30% or more SOP. The money gets spread down from presidents, governors, mayors and down to barangay (neighborhood/sub-district) chiefs. It’s Standard Operating Procedure because no one needs to ask for it, it just comes. There effectively is no non-corrupt executive leader in the Philippines. They don’t need to do anything other than do their jobs building roads, bridges, schools and hospitals and the dirty money flows right into their hands.

China has corruption too, of course, but it’s different.